Entanglement in the Quantum Game of Life

Abstract: We investigate the quantum dynamics of a spin chain that implements a quantum analog of Conway's game of life. We solve the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation starting with initial separable states and analyse the evolution of quantum correlations across the lattice. We report examples of evolutions leading to all-entangled chains and/or to time oscillating entangling structures and characterize them by means of entanglement and network measures. The quantum patterns result to be quite different from the classical ones, even in the dynamics of local observables. A peculiar instance is a structure behaving as the quantum analog of a blinker, but that has no classical counterpart.